Eastern Promises, the popular industry strand of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, has spent the last two years relegated to an online only event due to Covid-19, but the upcoming seventh edition of the event is now gearing up for what it hopes to be a vintage year as it returns in a physical capacity on Sunday, June 3.The three-day event, which looks to promote regional and international filmmakers with distributors, sales agents, producers and festival programmers, will unveil 35 selected film projects – all at various stages — through its Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch, First Cut+ Works in Progress and Odesa International Film Festival Works in Progress presentations.
The most promising projects will receive awards totalling up to €125,000 ($151,850).“The most important thing right now is that we’re back in a physical and on-site situation,” says head of film industry office Hugo Rosák. “We tried the online edition in the previous events and now we’re just looking forward to coming back to the physical pitching event.”This year, its First Cut+ program, which was launched in 2020 to boost the marketability of feature films that participated in its First Cut Lab, is now branching out to include projects beyond Central and Eastern Europe, which had typically been its remit in the past.
Much like its new Proxima Competition strand, which is opening up to include stories from beyond the region, First Cut+ this year will feature projects from Canada, Brazil as well as a UK-US-India co production dubbed Goldfish.“We’re testing it,” Rosák says. “I still want to keep our industry section in some way specialized because we still want to be relevant and have an expertise in something.
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